Organizations are constantly looking for better ways to gain value from their data assets. They adopt BI and analytics in hopes of understanding operations, increasing supply chain efficiencies, creating better sales processes, and enhancing customer experience. Unfortunately, many of these organizations fall short because they look at business intelligence and analytics access as a separate application from operations, creating silos and gaps into the performance of their business. Business users go about their daily tasks, have a question, and open up a different application to look at a premade dashboard (or create their own) through self-service access. Toggling between applications and not having an integrated way of accessing operational and analytical data creates time delays and overall inefficiencies. People may not get the answers they need or might spend more time looking for information instead of being able to act on it. This creates a disjointed approach to information visibility and business value.

What organizations need is a way to link analytical insights with operational processes to ensure that both are integrated. This level of tight integration creates a seamless view of what is happening within the company and takes advantage of opportunities in a proactive way. When analytics are embedded within operational and transactional applications, businesses no longer have to play guessing games and can gain visibility into what is happening within the organization on a regular basis. Managers and business users no longer have to search for the answers they need since those answers are provided as part of their daily tasks.